Erland Lee poetry reading: or return to a Canadian poetics

"Readings are the central social activity of poetry. They rival publishing as the most significant method of distribution for poetic works. They are as important as books and magazines in bringing poets into contact with one another, in forming generational and cross-generational, cultural and cross-cultural, links, affinities, alliances, communities, scenes, networks, exchanges and the like." (Charles Bernstein)

If any poetry venue can claim to inspire participants and, at the same time, give visible proof of the 'urban' and 'rural' mix that is the essence of Canadian poetry, it'd have to be the Erland Lee house in Stoney Creek. I was happy recently to organize a second poetry reading there, in the red adz-barn (as poet Katherine L. Gordon calls it) lying just adjacent to house. A sturdy plank two--tiered structure(technically a 'drive house'), it displays some of the original farm implements of late nineteenth-century Stoney Creek , while outside, on almost every side , stretching to the very horizon, lie the mostly uncultivated fields of an Ontario landscape that has virtually remained unchanged for hundreds of years. Everywhere is the rural poetic landscape of Isabella Valancy Crawford and Sir Charles G.D. Roberts: the same grid work of roads and orchards, same lush verdure of weed, grasses, & the same forest wildlife that had called a distinctively Canadian pioneer poetics into being.

But when you look directly ahead, & see cityscape sweeping below the escarpment to the shores of Lake Ontario and beyond to Toronto ( CN Tower always looking as if it's about to poke through the clouds!) naturally names like Al Purdy, Earle Birney and Milton Acorn come to mind, and all their literary descendants. A year ago a statue of Al Purdy was unveiled at Queen's Park, Toronto as testimony to one Canada's most popular city poets. And what may also come to mind is the terrible 'two solitudes' syndrome to which Canadians have grown accustomed because it now translates into split allegiance to the 'rural' and 'urban' literary consciousness. Behind us an early Canadian pioneering poetics but everywhere else, encroaching on the countryside, a city's own sensibility and distinctively jarring rhythms.

Who (and what) are we as poets: purveyors of a pioneer poetics, nostalgic for the old British 'models', or a contemporary poet attuned to a very different type of human buzz, always ready for novelty, experiment and academic discussion? Are we colonialist or postmodern in temperament? I posed that question at our Erland Lee reading and let each of my poet-friends give their own unique responses in verse.